Agreed. It's an array with 7 MEMS mics, which allows the Echo to do beamforming so they can essentially focus on the speaker while rejecting most of the other s

Agreed. It's an array with 7 MEMS mics, which allows the Echo to do beamforming so they can essentially focus on the speaker while rejecting most of the other sound. There have been advances in deep learning based speech recognition to reject noise - http://usa.baidu.com/deep-speech-lessons-from-deep-learning/ http://usa.baidu.com/deep-speech-lessons-from-deep-learning/ for instance, but clean audio source helps massively, especially if you are trying to talk from any distance instead of being right next to the mic. I haven't seen open source libraries for state of the art RNN/LSTM based speech recognition, anyone know if they exist? MEMS mics have been taking over electret mics recently, they are way smaller and have better SNR (at equivalent size). I'm building a 4 mic array at the moment, tetrahedral/ambisonics mic for VR use, the mics themselves are very cheap. Mouser and Digikey stock them - http://eu.mouser.com/Sensors/Audio-Sensors/MEMS-Microphones/_/N-98yda http://eu.mouser.com/Sensors/Audio-Sensors/MEMS-Microphones/... Haven't looked into the software/beamforming part yet - does anyone know if there are open source libraries for that? Some MEMS mics can also do ultrasound range, opening up pretty interesting possibilities for cheapo LIDAR type echolocation with a mic array - but that's for the next project :)